Red Light
Throughout the film, red and other neon lights situate us visually in a futuristic and uncanny world. The red light, in particular, comes on when there is a power cut in the building, and it is in these moments that the suspense of the film becomes heightened. In these moments, confident that Nathan cannot hear them, Ava confides in Caleb, and their private alliance emerges. The red light of these scenes signifies the fact that these are suspended moments while also indicating the danger at hand. Red is a symbol of the riskiness of this alliance, and the high stakes of what Ava is communicating with Caleb.
Nature
Nathan's home is situated on acres and acres of beautiful natural landscape. On his way there, Caleb asks the pilot when they will be arriving at the estate, to which the pilot replies, chuckling, that they have been flying above the estate for hours. Nathan has completely isolated himself from the rest of the world, presumably to have privacy while he develops his controversial invention. The fact that his facility, which is devoted to a project about artifice and technology, is placed in a beautiful natural landscape, highlights the contrast between the natural and the constructed world. Nathan, in trying to create a robot with consciousness, is seeking to play God, and he sees his participation in "the technological singularity" as an inevitability rather than a choice. In this way, his belief that he can create something "natural" out of an "artificial intelligence" is a kind of tragic error, a belief based in hubris. Of course, as we learn by the end of the film, Ava is not "natural," in that she is incapable of having a conscience, and she is endlessly capable of manipulation in order to achieve freedom. She has been programmed by information rather than by nature, which emerges as a fundamental distinction. By setting the film in such a beautiful, primordial, and remote natural environment, director Alex Garland highlights questions about what is "natural" versus what is produced/contrived, questions that are essential to the thematics of the film.
Ava and the Human Body
The image of Ava's body is particularly striking. She has a human face and human hands—arguably the most sensory and human-signifying parts of the body—yet the rest of her body is made up of computer parts. Thus, while the viewer, like Caleb, can get taken in by the soulfully expressive face of Alicia Vikander, the actress who plays Ava, we are also always aware of her status as technology. This merging of organic and artificial physical characteristics in Ava's body illuminates the uncanny contradictions with which a human must contend in interacting with this new technology. The viewers themselves participate in their own version of the "Turing Test"; we can see that Ava is a human woman, animated by an expressive actress who looks familiar to us, and yet her body would suggest that she is nothing but a series of programmed circuits and hardware. Thus the central ambiguity in the film is explicated in the film's visuals.
The Facility
The setting of the film, a large modern facility in the middle of a giant nature preserve, sets the scene for the film. When Caleb arrives at Nathan's home, every door is operated by technology and there seem to be no other human beings except for Nathan and Kyoko at the facility (which later becomes complicated by the realization that Kyoko too is a robot). The natural world surrounding Nathan's facility is beautiful and wild, an untamed and primordial topography that calls to mind images of prehistoric Earth, a time before humans. Yet the interior of the facility is sleek, high-tech, and luxurious, the epitome of minimalist tech wealth. It is a labyrinth of doors and security, heavily surveilled. As architecture, it represents Nathan's ambitions as well as his paranoia and desire for ultimate control.
